Gladden longevity — Episode #32

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, founder and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show, we want to answer three questions for you: How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? And how do we live well beyond 120? We want to help you optimize your longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information. Now, here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

The Gladden Longevity Podcast is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm here today with Barton Scott, a good friend of mine, actually. We've met at several conferences, and I've come to actually really appreciate the work that he does, his passion for what he's doing with regards to optimizing mineral content for people. I think it's a really often overlooked area of health and performance and longevity, for that matter. So, I'm really excited to welcome Barton to the show today. Hey, Barton. Good to have you.

Barton Scott: Jeff, great to be on with you. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, absolutely. So, I know that you have some things in your history, your family history even, I believe, that kind of pushed you down this pathway to start to discover the role that minerals play in health. Maybe you could just share that with the audience. I know you've shared your story more than one time, but for the sake of the listeners, it'd be helpful for them to kind of understand that.

Barton Scott: Yeah. Happy to do that. So, I was in my early twenties, and I'd been born to parents that had me in their forties. And was super thankful, I feel like I got lucky in a lot of ways. But because of that, I started to help my mom with her health for about five years before she passed. And one of the things that we found was that she was minerally deficient. And-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: How did you find that? Did you figure that out?

Barton Scott: Yeah. So, we did a bunch of functional medicine tests, and the one that I felt was most actionable for her and myself... And I can talk about my story and the driving force there too, which is mainly around brain fog or just my spaciness, as you might call it, where my mind had been just laser sharp the first couple years of college. And retention was something I just never thought of, really. And then I was like, "Whoa," because that sort of back and forth was so distinct for me, I realized, and that was brought down because of, in addition to athletic things like years of wrestling where I lost a lot of nutrients through sweating and having to make weight, so watching what you ate. So, cutting both consumption and also drastic output from a mineral standpoint means that, and this was a light bulb moment for me to understand, was that minerals play both offense and defense. Offense and defense.

And what I mean by that, offense, I think people understand, health. But defense, blocking heavy metals from absorbing into the body and getting the binding sites, the enzymatic binding sites. So, when you start to see it from that perspective, you go: "Wow, this makes a lot of sense." And it's really that periodic table. So, we know those are the elements. So, I started to think from that perspective, because I had a minor in chemistry at that point and had really taken enough of the right things to prepare me to understand that the problem was really around absorption. So, we did a hair test, to answer your question, straight away. And that was the test of the ones that we did that were really actionable.

I had actually my ex-girlfriend to thank because I was going down the path of doing all these different tests, and she had a friend that had cancer and she had found that test and found a lot of value in it and had started to feel well, or feel better, at least, and some of, I think, her symptoms had gone into remission. And I started to think: "Everything, really, should be reversible." There's reversible reactions in chemistry, and at cellular level we're just a mass of these different chemical interactions happening. So, I started to think from that perspective. And I ultimately realized, to wrap that part up really quickly, and this was a huge problem, was initially the hair test seemed really actionable, but I noticed as months went by and as we retested that the things that we were taking were not absorbing well. So, our levels weren't changing and neither were our symptoms.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, yeah, your levels and symptoms weren't changing. That's interesting. And I know it's a little bit of foreshadowing here in the conversation, but I know that the ratios of minerals are critical as well. So, did the tests that you had done at that point in time also give you insight into the ratios, or was it just levels, per se?

Barton Scott: It did. It did. I was lucky in that I had a great consultation. So, I understood the value, and I felt like the testing was this great North Star, this great guide star. But I realized that, well, we have to have products to just absorb better. And so, fast-forward to today, I've taken my background as a chemical engineer, and we had a background too in nanotechnology, and I realized that from a physics perspective, it was possible to make things as complicated as literally elevators to space out of carbon nanotubes, and just, to reel it in really quickly, the future of both nutritional supplements and also medication would most likely be nanotechnology, just a more efficient way of communication with the body that didn't rely on the gut, particularly with supplements. And-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, let me just get this straight. So, you're packaging minerals into nanoparticles of some sort that are then being absorbed? Because minerals can be pretty big and bulky as atoms.

Barton Scott: Right, right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: But is that what's happening? What are we talking about here?

Barton Scott: Right, right, right. So, what we're doing is we're getting the particle size of minerals, which are normally about five times to eight times larger than a red blood cell. So, we have a red blood cell right here, and then we have mineral particles that are not digested that are much larger. So, if you're playing basketball and you're trying to get the ball in the hoop, but the hoop is eight times too small, or five times too small at least, then it's going to be a difficult game of basketball, I think we'd all agree. So, thinking about that and going: "Well, how do we change this?" seemed to be the obvious answer. And it also seemed to be really apparent that the body was obviously breaking those mineral particles down for them to be absorbed. That seems very clear to me. So, with that understanding, I thought: "Well, we can get a process to do this. We, as people, are essentially machines."

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, you're almost predigesting them, in a way?

Barton Scott: Yeah. The thought was we, as people, are essentially machines. Our digestive systems, our endocrine systems, all of these things, these systems are essentially machines within a machine, within a machine, mitochondria within a machine, all these things. So, looking at what they need and when they are operating really well, how that works was just some of the concepts that I had in mind. And these are the kind of challenges that chemical engineers get paid to solve. But usually we're solving it with a distillation tower for someone like Exxon, and I just didn't want to do that much, or at least for very long. So, worked out of college for a bit, was feeling better, but still wasn't well, really. And was noticing some progress. We also noticed a lot of progress just from clearing up our household, from getting a lot of the toxic triggers out of the way. But when I say minerals play offense and defense, I've heard a stat that in one day, today in a modern city, we'll encounter as many as a lifetime's worth of toxins compared to just several hundred years ago. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty impressive, right?

Barton Scott: So, all the work that you're doing with longevity is so connected to that fact, I think in particular. Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Definitely one of the challenges. Okay. So, you basically found an accurate way to test, and you were taking action as best you could with supplements that you had available to you. And then you were finding that you weren't really making progress. And so, that led you to basically apply, let's call it a nano lens to it to basically see if we could fabricate minerals, mineral salts, really, I suppose, that then are absorbed more efficiently so that we can actually get them where they need to go and rebalance these ratios so we can play offense and defense effectively. That's kind of what I'm hearing.

Barton Scott: Right, right. Yeah. And then also being stable. So, that's part of our process. And I can't talk too much about that, but that is, yeah, the results really speak for themselves. Right now we have a sleep study that I think I might have mentioned this to you, early days of it, but the early results so far, the study's not done, to be fully transparent, but early results so far is about a 30% on average improvement in deep sleep from one bottle of Upgraded Magnesium with no other changes, not our process, not our testing, but certainly those things help.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: I think there was an impact on heart rate variability with that also, if I'm not mistaken.

Barton Scott: Yeah. HRV improved quite a bit, but we've had people that get something like 15 minutes of deep sleep and a ton of REM, which is obviously really bad for preventing disease since deep sleep's really, in my mind, the lead domino, right? Probably yours too.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah.

Barton Scott: In other words, for people listening, if you get deep sleep improved, let's say two hours or above every night, then at least from my perspective, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from my perspective, if you can do that, then almost everything eventually falls into place sleep-wise, or many, many, many things do. That's the one thing that I focus on most, like a lead domino.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It's kind of a ground floor. Yeah. It's kind of a ground floor that other things get built on, right?

Barton Scott: Right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It's kind of the foundational floor of the body's ability, well, first the brain's ability to basically clear out its own toxins from its day of metabolic activity, right? The lymphatic system, it's called. And you need deep sleep to actually accomplish that. So, that's critical. And so, when you clean out the foundational level, then your brain's in a position to work. But then, of course, you've got to build on top of that with the right nutrients, with the right exercise routines, the right everything else, right?

Barton Scott: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, yes, deep sleep, it's massive.

Barton Scott: The thing I'd mention there too is that magnesium has the ability to, you're talking about cleaning the brain, clearing the phosphate cloud that has built up through heavy mental work throughout the day, too. So, sometimes I'll take some with lunch, with vitamin D, because it can also keep calcium from over-absorbing in the body as well. So, I always take vitamin D with magnesium, B6, K2, boron, that's my personal stack. And we'll have a product that makes it easy for people soon with that. But, yeah, just the calcium, magnesium from a ratio standpoint's really important.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Let's talk about that for a second, because we all know that there's a pandemic or epidemic, I suppose, of low vitamin D levels, and there's a lot of push to absorb vitamin D and to basically get vitamin D. And as we age, we don't really convert it very well through the skin, even if we got sunshine. But most of us aren't out in the sun, so it makes it difficult. But there are people when they do get vitamin D, it's interesting, they actually absorb a lot more calcium and they can become significantly hypercalcemic. I've seen people actually have to stop vitamin D entirely because they became too hypercalcemic with it. It sounds like what you're saying is that combining it with magnesium is a way to block the calcium absorption so people can actually have the benefits of vitamin D but avoid the hypercalcemia. Is that correct?

Barton Scott: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Cool.

Barton Scott: We have the calcium ion channels in the brain, and that's a big part, too. There's some research that I've seen that has shown that, and I don't know how I feel about this, but has shown that too much calcium, holding the channel open too long in the brain can actually cause cell death in the brain. So, I don't know if you've seen something like that before or not, but-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, in a lot of conversations in the functional medicine space has been that nobody ever really needs to take calcium. And the reason being that you get enough calcium from your food. And you have all these people out there that have challenges with osteopenia or osteoporosis or whatever, particularly menopausal women, and they're all taking calcium, and yet it's not the calcium that's driving bone formation, right?

Barton Scott: Right, right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And calcium has been shown to be kind of a cellular toxin, particularly if you get too much of it. It will trigger cell death, apoptosis, et cetera. So, this whole idea of getting the calcium you need but not really pushing that so hard, I think that would be one takeaway from this podcast. If you're taking calcium, rethink that, right? So, anyway, that's really interesting stuff. Do you want to talk a little bit more about ratios related to calcium that might give people some more insight into that?

Barton Scott: I'd love to. Sure. So, calcium-magnesium is one, and that's the relationship between insulin and glucose. Calcium and phosphorus is what I was thinking about just now as you were talking because that is metabolism. And you talked about people having to go off of calcium and why that is and what some of the symptoms someone listening might be seeing. I think those are things like fatigue, inability to lose weight despite gym and otherwise good striving with nutrition from a macro standpoint.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Are you saying that people with too much calcium are having difficulty losing weight and struggling at the gym? Is that what I'm hearing, or did I miss that?

Barton Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's because of this relationship with calcium and phosphorus. So, calcium has the ability to... The seesaw. Right? So, as calcium comes up, phosphorus is going down. Phosphorus is also, I mean, besides being synonymous with intelligence, phosphorus is just a great mineral that we want on our side. You can notably have a zinc deficiency, and that zinc deficiency can drive a phosphorus deficiency, which also hurts you in that respect, right? So, we want to have good phosphorus levels, aided by good zinc levels.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, I'm not familiar with many people taking phosphorus, per se.

Barton Scott: Right, yep. So, phosphorus coming from a protein containing diet. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. We have a little bit of phosphorus in our Upgraded Memory, but just to give people that extra jolt if they have almost none. But if you don't have enough zinc, you won't utilize protein very well. And that's the reason why I was mentioning that. So, I'm glad you mentioned that. That's important for people to understand. You do want zinc to utilize protein well, to activate the proper enzyme pathways. So, that one's key. It really is. That's really, really, really important, because, as we know, when our metabolism is slow, I think of that just when our endocrine system is low. And usually we'll see calcium and phosphorus and also calcium and magnesium both be off if one is off. And the combination of that is that also usually the body's not clearing, it's not detoxing well. People aren't going to the bathroom often enough. They're not eliminating well enough or often enough thanks to a lower metabolism. That's part of it, certainly. And they're not fully utilizing the nutrients that come in.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, what's a good ratio for calcium to phosphorus?

Barton Scott: Really just kind of middle of a range in the hair test. So, anywhere middle of the range would be pretty solid if people are going through and testing regularly, which I really recommend. And that's the great thing about that test. No test is perfect, obviously. I'm the first to admit that. And also-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Do you want to talk a little bit about where people can actually get that hair test?

Barton Scott: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And the ideal sort of calcium to phosphorus, that's like about a 2.5 or so.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: 2.5.

Barton Scott: Yeah, 2.5 to one. So, your calcium is going to be higher, but yeah, like you said, calcium is not really what's missing if your bones are brittle, if you have osteopenia and things like that. It's most likely that someone has something that is causing them to be magnesium deficient and also they're not taking in enough magnesium, i.e., they have iron overload, for example, and they have poor ability to mobilize the iron, possibly. So, they are low in, for example, copper, and that's going to help them mobilize. So-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It's really a daisy chain of interactions between these minerals, right?

Barton Scott: Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: You've got copper, iron, magnesium, calcium, vitamin D. I mean, there's really this daisy chain of things. So, it's a pretty sophisticated thing. So, if somebody does the hair test, I think you guys have counselors, right, for people to call in and actually go over their test results. Is that true?

Barton Scott: We do. We do. We have nutritionists that just even before I trained them myself were incredibly knowledgeable in this area, or just great nutritionists as a standard, usually FDNs. They're used to ordering their own lab work, which they're able to do. A lot of them have had at least some level of HTMA training. And then I just interview them well, make sure they're up to training. And then, yeah, just our whole team right now is really, really good for that.

So, as I mentioned earlier, for me, 12 years ago, a consultation was very much a life changer because had I just only gotten the test, even though I had a background in chemistry that was really thorough and deep, I would have only been able to just look at, say, the things I was low in. I wouldn't have understood so many of the other things. And there's so many things like, for example, hidden copper toxicity, which you can spot on a hair test by triangulating different things. You can see an elevated level of magnesium, and that often tells you. Through questions, again, asking someone instead of just only going off of test results, you often find that they're most likely low in B6, and that helps the utilization of magnesium once it is absorbed. So, things like that. So, it is a mix of questions, and then looking at the graph. It's like: "Well, look, the test is telling me these things." But, basically, we start with asking questions-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, understood.

Barton Scott: ... and knowing what the results say.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Absolutely.

Barton Scott: So, they can find that on the site at upgradedformulas.com. Sure.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Let's talk about some of the other ratios, because we talked a little bit about metabolism and brain fog, but then talk a little bit about sodium and potassium. They're so important for cell membrane function, right, depolarization, energy production, things like that. Do you want to comment a little bit about sodium-potassium, how that works for us?

Barton Scott: Oh, sure. Yeah, I'd love to. Sodium and potassium. First of all, we all need salt. I had someone die recently that was a friend of the family. I heard about it late, and we couldn't get any word into the hospital. But I could tell there was just no chance she wasn't going to die because they cut all salt out of her diet for about six weeks. She was already swelling and she probably already had low salt. The body starts swelling to actually retain salt at some point, too. And so, we have that exactly opposite. So, of course, it was causing extreme stress on her joints. She was just puffing up a Michelin man commercial, and just stressing those joints, putting so much force on those joints. So, she's in pain, they're giving her morphine and then more morphine, and then she's gone. And I could just tell them, I was like: "Look, sodium is not bad. We have to have it to create mini adrenal hormones." So, the mineral corticoids.

Well, just to back up for people, if I asked any of you as listeners about how you create hormones, I'm curious, even if some of you specialize in hormones, if you could answer the question about the building blocks. Just name as many building blocks as you could for hormones. The one that gets missed, I think a lot of people name fats, for example, minerals get missed, and it's really minerals and fats that create the building blocks of hormones, from my perspective. Again, everything on the planet's created somehow through the elements, through the collection of elements. So, I'll leave that for people to think on, too.

And then to go back to sodium and potassium, generally. Sodium, very important for all the reasons. Potassium also very important for things like heart health, muscle contraction, adrenal health. And that ratio you want to be about two and a half to one. If you're under about a 1.4, you can all but guarantee that the person's going to certainly feel but probably also exhibit signs of emotional distress, i.e., things that you would label bipolar, for example. Certainly a nervousness, anxiety, a general sort of need to somehow manage that, and just a lower capacity to deal with the stressors of life. I would love to personally do a study with just a group that are all diagnosed as bipolar and see their levels. That would be really interesting. I would also love to do, yeah, that. And Asperger's too, I think would be really interesting, as well as autism. Certainly with autism we see a lot of heavy metal being a huge problem, too. But, yeah-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Got it. Got it.

Barton Scott: ... those are just a couple of thoughts around those two.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, that's interesting.

Barton Scott: Potassium's key for muscle building too, for putting on muscle.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And I guess one of the things is there are a few medical conditions where, with a background in cardiology, when people are in congestive heart failure, just so people are listening to this, a lot of times if people have some salt indiscretion, they'll come in and they will have swollen up. They'll get readmitted to the hospital because they've got more fluid in their lungs. But apart from a scenario like that, I think salt has been kind of vilified. And it's interesting, I think I've heard you talk about this before, that the sugar industry got into vilifying salt, because when people are a little bit lower on sodium or there's less sodium in their diet, they have more of a craving for sweets. Is that correct?

Barton Scott: Absolutely. The thing that you'll notice is that if you're eating quality salt, you'll never have fluid buildup. It's not really-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Tell me a little bit about quality. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about quality salt, because the salt I'm talking about is sodium chloride.

Barton Scott: Right, right. So, quality salt is balanced with a bunch of trace minerals. That's really how to think of it. So, you have all the ability to balance blood sugar and things, and that could be... I like a salt called Colima. I like another called Bamboo Jade. I like a Celtic.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: How do you spell that?

Barton Scott: Colima? C-O-L-I-M-A, I believe. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: C-O-L?

Barton Scott: Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Colima?

Barton Scott: Yeah. I-M-A. Uh-huh.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay.

Barton Scott: Right. Yeah. Colima salt. Bamboo Jade is probably my current favorite.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's spelt like bamboo?

Barton Scott: Hopefully, we don't sell out their stock.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right.

Barton Scott: But, yeah, Colima's great. Colima, they talk about it being microplastic free and packed with trace minerals, things like that. Yeah, I like a fine grain. I've heard that there can be some microplastics, and certainly iron, in pink salt. A lot of us have plenty of iron, actually. It's not necessarily bioavailable iron. There's a real problem. Again, one of our phrases that I think a lot of people have used, we actually own the trademark in a bunch of countries, including the US, is: "Test, don't guess." It just speaks to the fact that if we're supplementing something and we don't know what our levels are, and we don't know how that connects to other things, like we're supplementing iron, for example, but we don't know our copper level, we don't know our zinc level, we don't know magnesium level and calcium level, then we really are guessing, and that can put us in, in that case, a particularly dangerous spot. There's some things that are safer, like magnesium, to supplement, for one, but-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. Right, right, right. But yeah, I think that's super important for the audience to understand. We're talking about different supplements and salts and things like that, but I think, again, it's really testing before you kind of jump into that. Do they have access to the hair test on your website, on Upgraded Formula website? Yeah.

Barton Scott: Mm-hmm.

Yeah, upgradedformulas.com. We have the test, consultation. If you land on the home page, there's something called a foundational pack right at the top of the page, and that is four supplements that I recommend virtually everyone take. You can absolutely start taking them immediately and do your first hair test in that first week and, i.e., take the first hair sample. Now, if you shave your head, for example, you can do underarm or pubic. Those are the most ideal places to take the hair. And we have instructions on the website, video on the hair test page, things like that.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, that's a good question. That's a good question. Because hair grows at a slow pace. So, if you've got long hair and you trim the tips, that's going to be data from months ago, right?

Barton Scott: Right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Maybe even years ago in some cases.

Barton Scott: Right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, you want to be getting shorter hair that's closer to the root, so to speak, to be able to get-

Barton Scott: Fresh.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: ... I think, more up-to-date information, don't you think?

Barton Scott: Mm-hmm. Yeah, fresh.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, fresh data.

Barton Scott: Fresh data. Yeah. So, I like the inch closest to the skin or less. That could be even the inch and a half, if you have long hair but it's kind of thin, that could be inch and a half closest to the scalp. That's six to eight weeks of data. So, that gives you an average. That's not a bad thing, that's a good thing because that gives you an average. And what we find when we compare that to blood is that per nutrient sampled, we have 1,000 times more data. So, for people listening, imagine you're polling one person versus 1,000 people, so that's really what you're doing. You have a much larger section. So, then you're dividing that average and you're going: "All right, so the average is 63 based on this 1,000 samples, essentially." So, yeah, yeah, that's really helpful.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. There's an awful lot of issues with people with stress and adrenal fatigue and things like that. Do you want to talk a little bit about sodium-magnesium ratio-

Barton Scott: Sure.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: ... and some of the things related to adrenal health and things like that?

Barton Scott: Absolutely. So, sodium-magnesium, this is the area when I mentioned earlier, it's like, you want to test everything and not guess, but then I said magnesium's one of the things that's less harmful to just simply supplement. There's a caveat, and that caveat is the ratios of things that match with magnesium, particularly sodium, especially if someone has been not eating salt or they say they don't like salt on their food, most people that are eating particularly a low carb diet, P.S., should actually be salting their water, from my perspective, based on what I've seen through many, many, many hair tests over the years. And again, test, don't guess. Let's let your own results prove this or disprove this. But if you're taking a lot of magnesium, one thought, you'll most likely need a supplement B6 as well. And a common sort of supplement level there is about 100 milligrams of B6. So, that's a thought as well to keep in mind.

And also sodium, right? Sodium being the numerator in this equation, we want that to be in the diet. So, that may mean that you need to salt your water throughout your day. So, that also looks like filling up a big pitcher. I like reverse osmosis water, personally, and I like to remineralize it throughout the day, or maybe at the start of the day, fresh water in, a bunch of salt with a bunch of trace minerals, which is actually structuring the water. And then for bonus points, you could put it in sunlight or near sunlight, but just at least that. And then some other minerals that you might be low in, and then you sip that throughout the day. That really helps. That really helps. Yeah. In a book-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. Here's a question for you, because I think a lot of people, myself included, when you've taken minerals, it can be hard on your stomach. It's kind of like you get nauseous from taking minerals. And typically, you have to take them with food. But in utilizing the Upgraded Formulas, I haven't noticed that. Do you want to talk to that point? Because I think people may be cringing at the fact of trying to sip minerals throughout the day, particularly on a relatively empty stomach, but I just want to kind of just weigh that fear, if you will, or allay that fear.

Barton Scott: Yeah, two thoughts. One, you're right, that can happen, particularly with most mineral products. Ours is absorbed. Probably the main thing to say is it's absorbed really without digestion. So, before the minerals reach the stomach, they're mainly absorbed, if not completely at that point.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Really?

Barton Scott: So, we're getting into the red blood cells and, yeah, we're not really relying on the digestive system, which drastically improves the ability to absorb, right? So, most people, unfortunately, I think, will live and die with probably a lot, if not some level, of blood dysfunction. That's furthered by the lack of nutrients in the soil, which leads to a stress state on top of our current lifestyles. And that stress leads us to consume foods that aren't in our favor, in our highest good, as we might say. So, things like a lot of sugary things or even just too much dark chocolate that are then off changing the ratios that are important in our body. As that happens-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: What's the problem with dark chocolate? Just so people understand.

Barton Scott: Oh, just that a lot of dark chocolate will still have a lot of sugar in it. I love it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, I see.

Barton Scott: Yeah, yeah. But let's say just sugary things. So, sugary things, and then now we have some level of dysbiosis in the gut, or SIBO, small intestine. So, now we're also probably producing, at this point, less HCL, so less ability to break things down and therefore absorb them from our food, and all these things compound. So, I see the new certainly gut health and minerals being two prime areas of focus for performance and longevity, and just because they feed into each other. We really do try to soothe ourselves with food. But also, when we're low in food, our body's driving us to eat more of something that it found nutrients in in the past. So, we're trying to get the nutrients from whatever thing. Maybe we'd need vitamin C, and we're trying to get it from oranges, so we're eating a lot of oranges. Yeah. So, there's a balance to everything.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. I think this gets back to the concept of really trying to eat nutrient-dense foods throughout the day also, because we're over-fed and undernourished, quite honestly, with the processed foods, et cetera, and not only the toxins that are in those foods but just the nutrient value. So, if you can go to organic foods and basically eat nutrient-dense food, vegetables and some fruit, and if you're eating meat or whatever else, that nutrient density just counts for a lot. And it's interesting to me, when I eat nutrient dense, it's kind of like my appetite goes away because my body's sated by the nutrients that I'm getting in, and I'm not reaching for something else to try to get them, and it's not really there, but you keep eating it because it has something in it that tastes good, right?

Barton Scott: Right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, I think that's a really important thing to do, too. So, do you find that getting these minerals right, particularly with balancing out the adrenals, that it helps people lose weight and sleep better and all that sort of thing? I would think that would be the case, right?

Barton Scott: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Certainly, probably a lot of people know with listening to this is that if your blood sugar does some unruly things throughout the night, you're going to wake up. If your adrenals are really starving for these nutrients that we're talking about, they're not going to produce hormones very well, and they're not going to be able to balance or mitigate the... Yeah, I know we talk about snowboarding a lot. It's kind of like they're having this snowboard or surf, if you're talking about surfing, surfing some really high waves with these fluctuations, these changes. The adrenals are part of that process too, right? So, being able to understand that all of that contributes to sleeping well is very important.

Now, magnesium in the natMg ratio is also very important in people sleeping well, certainly, and not waking up in the night. Yeah. Also bladder, having the bladder fully distend. So, by distend, for people listening, I'm talking about we want the bladder to expand fully, to its full capacity, and be able to hold enough fluid throughout the night so we don't wake up to go to the bathroom. So, magnesium helps that relaxation of all muscles, including the muscles that are controlling the bladder. So, you see that people are waking up multiple times during the night. They almost certainly have magnesium deficiency. That doesn't mean they also don't possibly also have sodium deficiency or other deficiencies: calcium, potassium, things like that. They're important players.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. And to that point, a lot of men will develop prostate enlargement, which can-

Barton Scott: Zinc deficiency related. Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. Which I was just going to say, can be associated with zinc deficiency. So, if you're urinating at night and you're a man, and you're at that point in life when testosterone may be going down, zinc and magnesium together may be a good option there. Again, testing would be the way to look at it, but interesting how that falls into place.

Barton Scott: Yeah, yeah. And also looking at particularly men over 40, or 40 and older, if you haven't given blood, you're almost surely high in at least bio-unavailable copper, but maybe bioavailable copper, because a lot of the iron that we need each day is actually provided through a recycling system in the body. So, there's some research to show that we may only need about 5% of our daily value through food, something like a milligram or two. Whether or not that's true, I don't know. But what I can say is test, don't guess, and also most likely give blood. People need it. It'll help you develop a lot of iron and other metals. Again, iron does a lot of work in the body, for sure, and you don't want to just blatantly... But you could be in a spot where that really benefits you. And also, if you have high iron, it'll be very aging as well.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, high ferritin, high iron, something we look at all the time. And even therapeutic phlebotomy. Not everybody's blood will be acceptable to the blood bank, but you can still do what's called a therapeutic phlebotomy, where they take a unit of blood and just throw it in the trash. And even that does have good longevity benefits. It's not the same as doing plasmapheresis, where half your plasma volume is replaced. But in that context too, you're getting rid of... We'll call it bad humor, so to speak. But giving blood is a healthy thing to do. And I don't think many people in the longevity space probably talk about that enough, how helpful that really is. So, cool, cool, cool.

Barton Scott: Yeah, I love that, too. What you just mentioned about plasmapheresis.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah.

Barton Scott: Is that what you said, or what was that? Maybe you could [inaudible 00:40:36]-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Well, yeah, plasmapheresis is a-

Barton Scott: ... talk a little more about that.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. We do it here in the clinic. You can be hooked up to a plasmapheresis machine. You have an IV in one arm and an IV in the other arm. We're pulling blood out of one arm. It's going into the machine, which is separating the plasma from the red blood cells and the white blood cells. So, all the cellular components are spared, but the plasma is pulled off, and then it's replaced either with albumin, a solution which is the main protein in the blood, and infused back in, or, in some circumstances, with young plasma from, say, an 18 to 24 year old.

So, now you're getting the added benefit of removing... what shall I say? ... old blood proteins and inflammatory cytokines, and maybe some of these non-bioavailable minerals and things like that are going out. Then you're bringing in youthful factors like higher levels of GDF11 and some other things. And it is sort of like changing out the water in the swimming pool that everything else is trying to work in. So, then if you're working with stem cells or regenerative therapies, your swimmers that you're asking to work in the pool can swim a lot faster if the pool is clean. So, that's one of our approaches here. Yeah.